Over the years, the Firefox front-end team has made numerous polishes and updates to the Firefox theme.

Firefox 4 was a huge update to the user interface of Firefox compared to Firefox 3.6. A couple years down the line we released Australis in Firefox 29. Next month we’ll be releasing Firefox 40 and with it will come with what I believe to be the most polished UI we’ve shipped to date.

The Australis release was great in so many ways. It may have taken a bit longer than many had expected to get released, but much of that was due to the complexities of the Firefox theme code. During the Australis release we removed some lesser used features which consistently were a pain in the rear when making theme changes (small icons and icons+text mode, I’m looking at both of you 👀).

Now with Firefox 40, we’re able to show the benefits of our refined theme code and our ability to ship updated and modern themes much faster than ever before.

With Firefox 40 on Windows 10, which you can download today using the Firefox Beta channel, we’ve matched the tabstrip and toolbar to the native Windows 10 theme. This includes refinements to our standard icon set, as well as much improved HiDPI (>1dppx) support. All of our first-tier icons now have 2× variants that are shipped with the browser, and the remaining icons buried in the depths of the browser should be fixed soon as well.

My favorite feature of Firefox on Windows 10 is the increased URL and search bar height (pictured above). This is actually something that we’ve wanted to do for a couple years. Firefox has continually had a pretty small font-size for the URL bar, one which makes it hard for users with poor vision to read. The text in our URL and search bars is now on-par with competing browsers. It may not seem like a big deal to most, but it is the small cuts like these that can either add up to cause death by a thousand wounds or be part of the stitches in a bullet-proof product.

We are now a week away from the release of Firefox 38, and with it will finally come the release of in-content preferences. You can download Firefox Beta today to see what it will look like when it hits Release next week.

I want to give a huge thanks to all of the people who worked on the project. You all helped it get to the point where hundreds of millions of people will get to see a refreshed and modern preference experience.

Known issues:
1) Dialogs opened in the Advanced pane don’t use the same tab-modal dialog implementation that can be found within the rest of the preferences. We hope to get this fixed in a future release very soon.
2) The design for focus rings within the preferences still has a refresh coming, but it won’t make Firefox 38. As with #1, we hope to get this in to a future release very soon.
3) If you have gone to about:config and set browser.search.showOneOffButtons to `false`, the Search pane of the preferences is broken. The fix for this didn’t make the 38.0 cut-off, but it will be fixed within the next few weeks following release. Going forward this preference will be removed, so now may be a good time to revert that preference back to `true`.

Firefox 38 has now merged to Aurora (Firefox Developer Edition) and we are a couple weeks into development of Firefox 39 on mozilla-central. At this point, bugs that are fixed on mozilla-central will need to be uplifted to mozilla-aurora to continue to ride the 38 train.

These are some of the 21 bugs that were fixed since the last update (1/31/2015):

Since the last update all of the P1-tracked bugs have been fixed. We are tracking the following P2 bugs:Bug 1043612 – Persist the size of resizable in-content subdialogsBug 1136645 – InContent prefs – Make focusrings match the spec on Windows and LinuxBug 1044600 – in-content preferences: empty dialogs after pressing backspace or the Back button

Bug 1044600 in the above list should be very close to getting fixed. It has landed and been backed out a couple times due to intermittent failures and leaks, but is making steady progress towards being fixed.

Gijs and I will be meeting up in less than two weeks in San Francisco to have a “hack week” focusing on the in-content preferences. We’ve gone through the list of bugs in the in-content preferences and put together a subset of 10 bugs that we’ll tackle during the week if they’re not fixed beforehand.

Big thanks go out to Ian Moody [:Kwan], Gijs, Yash Mehrotra, Richard Marti [:Paenglab], and Tim Nguyen [:ntim] for their help in fixing the 21 bugs.

Bug 736572 – pageinfo columns should have arrows showing which column is sorted and sort direction

Bug 418517 – Add “Select All” button to Page Info “Media” tab

Bug 967319 – Show a nodesList result with natural order

I was hoping to have 8-9 bugs fixed by this time, but I’m happy with four bugs fixed and two bugs being pretty close. Bug 967319 in the “being worked on” section is also close, but still needs work with tests before it can be ready for review.

Today starts the first day of the mentoring program that I announced in my previous blog post.

In good news, I was overwhelmed by the number of responses I received to the blog post. Within three days, 57 people sent me an email requesting to be a part of the program. This tells me there is a strong need for more guided programs like this. On the downside, it was very hard to select only four people from the group.

In the end, I ended up selecting five people to partake in this. They are from all over the world: India (2); Germany; and USA (2).

I have assigned the first bugs and work should proceed this week on getting a build working and finding their way through the Firefox developer ecosystem.

Update: Due to a large number of responses, I will be letting people know today, February 14th (instead of the previously mentioned February 13th).

Since I joined Mozilla I’ve been looking for ways to increase the opportunities for new people to get started working on the Firefox user interface.

I’m now ready to try something that I’ve been thinking about doing for a little while.

I’m looking for four people that I will mentor and help along as they fix bugs across the Firefox user interface. The first bug will be an easy one to get started with the codebase and comfortable building the browser, and they will increase in difficulty from there. At the end of the program you will be able to say that you’ve made some large contributions to Firefox. We will use JavaScript, CSS, and XUL (similar to HTML).

The project will be about six weeks long, starting February 16th and ending March 31st. During this time, I will be available to meet through video chat, IRC (text-based chat), and email.

If you are interested in working with me and have at least two to three years of classroom experience in Computer Science (or equivalent open source experience), please send an email to jaws+goodfirstmentee@mozilla.com along with:

Your name

A short 1-2 sentences about any open source experience you have

And a rough estimate of how many hours per week you think you could dedicate towards the program.

I’ll let you know if you’ve been accepted by February 13th 14th. Thanks!

We are now about half-way through the normal development cycle of Firefox 38. In about 3-4 weeks, what is currently “Nightly 38″ will become “Firefox Developer Edition 38″ (previously known as Firefox Aurora). At this point, beta builds of Firefox 36 will now revert back to the old-school preferences implementation. Firefox Beta will see the in-content preferences get more testing at the beginning of the Beta 37 iteration.

These are some of the bugs that have been fixed since the last update:Bug 1022582 – Checkboxes and radio buttons in about:preferences lack any indication they’re checked/selected when using High Contrast modeBug 1043346 – InContent Prefs – Dialogs should have their dimensions reset after closingBug 1008172 – Scrolling up and down on pages with scrollbars in about:preferences will change subgroups (the Advanced subpanes)Bug 1012223 – in-content preferences loading slowly

I’ve gone through the remaining bugs and attached both a “point” value as well as priorities for the bugs. Point values follow the Fibonacci sequence, and should roughly approximate the difficulty of fixing the bug. Priorities range from P1 to P3.

P1 bugs are considered those that block using the feature, as well as those that are highly visible. We are tracking three P1 bugs:Bug 1108302 – Font size select list shows ellipsis instead of selected value (points = 1)Bug 1044597 – in-content preferences: resized dialogs should not push buttons into overflow (points = 3)Bug 1047586 – Unable to interact with In-content preferences after changing Font size (points = 5)